Lynn is a blue collar city of 90,000. The Obama Administration dumps an increasing number of immigrants on the city’s school system each year, from 54 in the 2010-11 school year to 329 in 2011-12, 421 in 2012-13, and 538 in 2013-14.

When Mayor Kennedy came into office 4 ½ years ago, Lynn had a $16 million surplus and an AAA bond rating. Since then, increased expenses from immigration have lowered the city’s bond rating to A+, increasing the cost of borrowing. New facilities need to be constructed. Community policing programs that successfully fought gang violence had to be canceled.

And American students, as well as taxpayers, pay the price. Some new attendees arrive not only ignorant of English but Spanish as well. This forces huge logistical problems on the school system. Many of the immigrants drop out to work in both the beginning of the fall, return, and then drop out again near the end of spring. This means they are counted as “drop outs” twice in official figures, devastating the academic ratings of the school system and hurting property values and quality of life. [Local Impact of Illegal Border Surge, CIS, August 2014]

What is to be done? Dino Drudi, an economist in the audience, suggested that Lynn should sue the Department of Justice for failing to protect against “invasion,” as called for in the Constitution. Of course, as CIS Senior Policy Analyst Jessica Vaughan commented, even identifying aliens as illegal is a “quaint concept” for our federal government.

Mayor Kennedy didn’t speculate on what the federal government should do to ensure border security. But she is talking to Congressmen about how their failure to enforce the law is hurting her community—and as CIS Analyst Vaughan noted, Lynn, Massachusetts is hardly alone.

The federal government sure could use a wakeup call. According to the August 27 Wall Street Journal, the lead candidate to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a Hispanic woman—the first of that particular demographic to head the agency. [Texas Federal Prosecutor Saldaña Is Leading Candidate to Run ICE, by Devlin Barrett] Is this just another Politically Correct gesture at a time of crisis? It certainly fits with the federal government’s seizing the immigration invasion as an opportunity to punish the historic American nation.

This is has gone far enough. If a Massachusetts Mayor (ironically sharing the surname of the Senator who unleashed the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act) can brave the inevitable charges of “racism” and speak out, so must ordinary Americans. This means making sure that immigration is the number one issue of the 2014 campaign—and the campaigns that follow.

Lynn, Massachusetts suffering a fiscal downgrade is an apt symbol for what mass immigration has done to our country. We had a standard of living that was the envy of the world. But mass immigration has made us a second rate nation with far too many of us slouching towards a Third World standard of living.

Mass immigration is the key issue underlying the problems facing ordinary Americans—and immigration patriots need to push it to the forefront.